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2: unlike variable names in traditiona code wires in labview typically don't have names. This makes it hard to understand what each wire is for (yes i'm pretty sure there is a way to label them, but it's something you have to do extra not something that naturally comes as part of the coding like in traditional languages)
3: I can never remember what all the little pictures on the blocks mean.
4: I find connecting the blocks very fiddly.

Having said that some people seem to like it.

That's exactly it. You find yourself going back to words. And the simplest use of words is just plain old text, maybe with colors, maybe with shades, maybe with lines joining relevant bits of text for visual guidance, but it's still text. Better still, there is a thing called a keyboard, with all the letters you'll ever want to use and cleverly designed to make use of all your fingers (as opposed to a mouse or touch screen which in practice reduces you to at most three fingers and a lot of elbow/wrist work... maybe that has appeal for some!), and spares the use of your visual cortex (large, energy intensive part of the brain) to endlessly process images and lines. I can do several lines of programming without looking at the screen but maybe looking at a spec or template before I have to look up and see if it's right. Can't imageine how you'd do that with icon dragging AFAIK.

Try Lego Mindstorms and see whether you find it quicker or slower. It's easy to make something simple but once the algorithm gets complicated it is not much easier to decipher than text code, and no faster in my experience. As soon as you want to get serious with the system, you will wish it had a low level system that lets you lay it out in text instead of images.

This is partly the reason why surviving languages use symbols representing sounds rather than images as the Egyptians used. It's faster to write, and possibly faster to read.

look forward to some other new site/wiki/blog/Fuhrerbunker/casino where I can digitally rub shoulders with y'all in the VERY near future. There are already several posts in other current threads about a possible Altslashdot.org; who knows what other new purpose-built destinations might come to be? But I truly have very little further hope for this fascinating & enlightening place that I've been visiting since before 9/11. It's a place that I miss already, if you know what I mean.

If you can't compete, make your documentation open-source in the hope this will boot-strap some extra business.

Too little too late. For YEARS we have been screaming for nvidia drivers that aren't buggy, closed and unstable, to the point of writing Nuveau, an open source hack (remarkably good but still crippled). Rot in hell, NVIDIA - I have wasted enough money on your hardware.

Everything has to do with productivity. Sure we all like a bit of novelty and it's fun to tinker with new features of a desktop or user interface, but the majority of these innovations are never used (if the user has the choice), but the recent Linux desktops (Gnome mostly) have forced a new set of heuristics on a user base that increasingly uses Linux for productivity and not just tinkering.

It's a waste of time to have to learn a new way of doing everything when the existing ways work already. That is why 'classic desktop' is favored. It works, and although new things might work, they have not proven to work better.

REALLY stupid question. It is not like they are going to wave them about for everyone to see. They most likely exist.

Yes, the weaponization is built into every Intel processor, and probably most other processors and controllers. The weapons in cyber warfare start with the smart phones we point at our own heads and will shortly be the cars which can crash us into the next tree or fail to stop at the next busy intersection.

I doubt much of our honey comes from bees in the wild and bee farmers have no reason to starting using plastic nests

The bees don't ask the farmers where to find their building materials, unless the farmed bees are in an area devoid of plastic for several miles around the hive, there is nothing to say the bees won't harvest rotting plastic bags or building materials that might be lying around in the brush. Read the article!

I think it's prudent to question whether this bug in Google's browser is intentional or unintentional.

I think it is safe to assume, for any verbal discussion of importance, that all smart phones in the room have their microphones on with voice recognition running. Sure, most of the time they are not, but:

1. They are the perfect bugging tool.

2. The person you are talking to might be recording everything anyway

and 3. if you are in any kind of position that could possibly be envied, someone is bound to be doing this to you.